Thriller

On our final episode of 2022, we look back at the music video/mini-movie for Michael Jackson's Thriller, on the fortieth anniversary on the release of the album which bore its name.

Transcript:

 

Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.

If you’re listening to this episode as I release it, on November 30th, 2022, today is the fortieth anniversary of the release of the biggest album ever released, Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Over the course of those forty years, it has sold more than seventy million copies. It won a record-breaking eight Grammy Awards. A performance of one of its signature songs, Billie Jean, for a televised concert celebrating the 25th anniversary of Motown Records would introduce The Moonwalk to an astonished audience, first in the auditorium and then on TV screens around the world. The album was so big, even MTV couldn’t ignore it. Michael Jackson would become the first black artist to be put into regular rotation on the two year old cable channel.

So what does all this have to do with movies, you ask.

That’s a good question.

Because out of this album came one of the most iconic moments in the entertainment industry. Not just for MTV or the music industry, but for the emerging home video industry that needed that one thing to become mainstream.

The music video for the album’s title song, Thriller.

Thriller was the sixth solo album by Michael Jackson, even though he was still a member of The Jacksons band alongside his brothers Jackie, Jermaine, Marlon, Randy and Tito. Although The Jacksons were still selling millions of albums with each release, Michael’s 1979 solo album Off the Wall made him a solo star, selling more than ten million copies worldwide in its first year of release, almost as much as all of the previous Jacksons albums combined. After the completion of The Jackson’s 1980 album Triumph, Jackson would re-team with his Off the Wall producer, the legendary Quincy Jones, to try and craft a new album that would blow Off the Wall out of the water. Jackson wanted every song on the album to be a killer. Every song a hit.

Over the course of 1981 and 1982, Jackson and Jones would work on no less than thirty songs that could be included on the final album, and assembled some of the biggest names in the music industry to play on it, including David Foster, James Ingram, Paul McCartney, Rob Temperton, Eddie Van Halen, and the members of the band Toto, who were having a great 1982 already with the release of their fourth album, which featured such seminal hits at Africa and Rosanna. Recording on the album would begin in April 1982 with the Jackson-penned The Girl is Mine, a duet with Paul McCartney that Jackson hoped would become even bigger than Ebony and Ivory, the former Beatle’s duet with Stevie Wonder which had been released a few weeks earlier and was be the number one song in a number of countries at that moment.

There would be three other songs on the final album written by Jackson, Beat It, Billie Jean, and Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’, which Jackson would co-produce with Jones. The other five songs, Baby Be Mine, Human Nature, The Lady in My Life, P.Y.T. and the title track, would be written by other artists like James Ingram, Steve Pocaro of Toto, and Rob Temperton, who were also working on the album as backup singers and/or musicians.

The final mixing of the album would continue up until three weeks before its expected November 30th, 1982 release, even though The Girl Is Mine had already been released as a single to radio stations and record stores on October 18th. While the song wouldn’t exactly set the world on fire or presage the massive success of the album it had come from, the single would sell more than a million copies, and hit number two on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.

When the album was released, it sold well, but it wouldn’t be until Billie Jean, the second single from the album, was released on January 2nd, 1983, that things really started to take off. Within three weeks, the song would already hit #1 on the Billboard R&B charts.

But it would still a few more weeks for white America to take notice.

In early 1983, the music world was dominated by the cable channel MTV, which in less than two years had gone from being a small cable channel launched in only portions of New Jersey to making global stars of such musical acts as Duran Duran, Eurythmics, U2 and even Weird Al Yankovich. But they just were not playing black artists. The lack of black music on MTV was so noticeable that, in an interview with MTV VJ Mark Goodman timed to the release of his comeback album Let’s Dance, David Bowie would admonish the VJ and the channel for not doing its part to promote black artists. MTV’s excuse, for lack of a better word, was that the network’s executives saw the channel as being rock centered, and Billie Jean was not “rock” enough for the channel.

The president of Jackson’s record label, CBS, was more than just enraged by the channel’s refusal to show the video for Billie Jean. He threatened to pull every single CBS act off the air, and never give MTV another music video to air. Could MTV really afford to lose Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel and Journey and Toto and The Clash and Joe Jackson, Eddie Money, Chicago, Judas Priest, ELO, Adam Ant, Cheap Trick, Loverboy, Heart, Men at Work and a hundred other artists that accounted for more than a quarter of all the music videos in rotation on the channel at the time?

MTV would add Billie Jean to its rotation on March 10th, 1983.

Within a month, both the song and the album would hit #1 on their respective charts.

Lost in all the hubbub about Billie Jean was that Beat It, with its blistering Eddie Van Halen guitar solo, had been released as a single on February 14th, and it too would become a #1 hit song. In fact, after Billie Jean topped the charts for seven weeks, Beat It would become the #1 song in the nation, after a single week of Dexy’s Midnight Runners taking the top spot.

Ironically, despite how they felt about Billie Jean just a few weeks earlier, MTV would actually be the first outlet to show the Beat It video, not three weeks after it finally relented on Billie Jean.

Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’, Human Nature, and P.Y.T. were all released as singles between May and September 1983, but none of them would have the success enjoyed by Billie Jean and Beat It, and sales for the Thriller album were starting to wane. There were only three songs left on the album that hadn’t been released as singles yet, and neither Baby Be Mine not The Lady in My Life were the kinds of songs that would be featured as singles.

That left Thriller.

There never was a plan for Thriller to be released as a single. The label saw the song, with its vaguely spooky lyrics and ending narration by legendary horror actor Vincent Price, as a novelty song, not unlike a Weird Al Yankovic song.

In early August 1983, Jackson would see An American Werewolf in London. He loved the movie, especially the scenes where actor David Naughton would transform into a werewolf on screen. The film’s director, John Landis, was working in London at the time, and late one evening, the phone in his hotel room would ring. It was Michael Jackson. The singer wanted to know if Landis would come aboard to make a music video based on this song, and help turn him into a monster. “Michael, it’s 2am in London,” Landis would exclaim to the excited singer on the other end of the line. “I will call you when I get back to Los Angeles in a couple weeks,” he’d say, before hanging up the phone and went back to sleep.

Except Landis didn’t wait for his return to the States to call Jackson back. The filmmaker and the singer would, despite the eight hour time difference, speak several times over the phone about ideas for a music video.

For weeks, Landis, Landis’s costume designer wife Deborah Nadoolman, and Rick Baker, the genius behind the practical makeup effects for An American Werewolf in London, would meet with Jackson to discuss story, choreography, makeup and costuming. 

Landis and his producing partner, George Foley Jr., would come up with a final story that featured a story about a young man and a young woman who find themselves being chased by zombies through the streets of Los Angeles, before the boy becomes, at various times, a zombie himself and a werewolf-like cat creature. It was going to be Landis’s homage to fun horror movies of the past, from I Was a Teenage Wereworld to Night of the Living Dead.

Landis and Folsey would present the president of CBS Records with a script for the project, and a $900,000 budget, ten times more than the average music video cost to make at the time and nearly triple the previous record for the highest budget for a music video at that time. And unlike most videos made at the time, it would be shot using 35mm film and Arriflex cameras.

It was not going to be just a music video.

This was going to be a mini-movie.

The record label president was not pleased.

Album sales for Thriller had been slowing, and it did not make sense for them to spend nearly a million dollars to make a video for what would be the seventh and riskiest single off the album. 

They refused to pay for it.

So Folsey, Jackson and Landis would go to the major television networks, to see if they would be willing to finance the project, which they pitched as not only getting a fifteen minute music video from one of the biggest artists in the world, but also a thirty minute making-of documentary, so the entire program could be slotted for a full hour of airtime including commercials.

They would all say no.

Then they went to MTV, who had seen a dramatic spike in subscriptions since they started airing Billie Jean and Beat it, in the hopes they would want in on the action. They would also decline, because they had a policy of not financing ANY music videos. Music videos were promotions for the record labels. They should be paying for the making of them.

They then went to cable movie channels like HBO and Showtime. Imagine having exclusive rights to a fifteen minute mini-movie from the biggest music star on the planet, they would suggest, as well as a forty-five minute making-of feature that could be slotted for a full hour of programming. Imagine how many new subscribers you’d get if your channel was the only place to see it!

Showtime would agree to finance half the video in exchange for exclusive movie channel rights to screen Thriller.

Sensing there might actually be a market for this, Jackson’s record label would commit to throw in $100,000, if they could find another partner to cover the rest. 

MTV would make up the difference, after deciding they were not financing a music video but indeed a short motion picture and a making-of featurette.

Landis would bring a number of his regular collaborators with him. In addition to producing partner George Foley Jr. and costume designer Deborah Nadoolman, Landis would have his American Werewolf in London cinematographer Robert Paynter behind the camera, Malcolm Campbell, who had edited American Werewolf and Trading Places, assembling the final footage, and the legendary music composer Elmer Bernstein, who created the scores for Animal House and American Werewolf, to provide an incidental musical score to the movie inside the movie, and other sequences not directly related to Jackson’s song.

The vast majority of the shoot, which took place over four nights in October, the 11th through the 14th, would take place around Downtown Los Angeles. The scenes at the movie theatre were filmed at the Palace Theatre on Broadway, while the zombie dance was filmed a couple miles to the south at Calzona Street and Union Pacific Avenue and the final house sequence was filmed in the Echo Park neighborhood just northwest of downtown. 

Side note: the Palace Theatre is still there, and still occasionally shows movies to this day, and both the intersection where the dance sequence was filmed and the neighborhood where the final chase sequence took place still look remarkably similar to what they did forty years ago.

And how quickly did it take for Landis and his team to get the footage assembled?

Thriller would have its first screening at the Crest Theatre in Westwood Village on November 14th, 1983, not thirty days after filming was complete. John Landis would tell Nancy Griffin in a 2010 Vanity Fair oral history about Thriller that despite having been to events like the Oscars, the Emmys and the Golden Globes, he had never seen a turnout like the one he witnessed that night. Diana Ross, who had discovered the Jacksons nearly twenty years earlier, was there. As was Prince and Eddie Murphy and Warren Beatty. Ola Ray, Jackson’s co-star in the film, was there too, and before the screening, she noticed Jackson was nowhere to be found. She would find him a few moments later, hiding in the projection booth with the projector operator. Ray would do her best to lure Jackson out, to mingle with the crowd. This was his night, after all. But Jackson would only compliment Ray on her dress, and tell her to go enjoy herself.

Once the crowd was seated, Landis would warm the crowd up with some light banter and a screening of a new print of a Mickey Mouse cartoon, The Band Concert, that Jackson was able to get Disney to strike just for this occasion. It’s one of Disney’s best cartoons, and the crowd would enjoy it. But they were here to see what amazing thing Michael would pull off this time.

Finally, the main event would begin. And the first thing the audience would see was a disclaimer…

“Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult. Michael Jackson.”

This was in reaction to word that Jackson had gotten a couple weeks earlier from the leaders of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, to which he was a practicing member of at the time, that he risked being excommunicated from the church. The church was worried the film, which, incidentally, they had not seen yet, would promote demonology to younger people. At first, Jackson would call his assistant and order them to destroy the negatives to the film. The assistant, with the help of the production team, would instead lock the negatives up in a safe place until a compromise could be reached. It would be Jackson’s assistant who came up with the pre-roll statement, which was acceptable to Jackson, to the church, and to the production team.

At the end of the screening, Jackson, Landis and the film received a standing ovation. Eddie Murphy screamed out “Show the damn thing again!” And they did.

John Landis hadn’t made a music video. He made a short movie musical. And he wanted recognition for his efforts. So despite his standing in the industry as a semi-pariah due to the ongoing legal troubles concerning the Twilight Zone accident, Landis wanted an Oscar for his work. The movie was that good.

Even though he had never worked with Disney in the past, Landis was able to convince the studio to allow him to screen the PG-rated Thriller mini-movie in front of the G-rated Fantasia, which was going to be released on Thursday, November 24th, on one screen in Los Angeles. The L.A. Times newspaper ad would be a split image. On the top half, Mickey in his Sorcerer’s Apprentice getup, and on the bottom, listed as an “extra added attraction,” Michael in his leather jacket, in a nearly identical pose to the cartoon mouse above him. Five shows a day for seven days, with an extra late show on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Academy members and one guest could present their membership card at the box office for free tickets to see Thriller on the Avco Cinema Center, then stay and watch Fantasia as well.

If you want to see a not exceptional image of the newspaper ad, make sure you head over to this episode’s entry on our website, the80smoviepodcast.com

Now, I’m not sure how many free tickets were given away to Academy members that week, but practically every screening was sold out. While the $52,000 worth of tickets sold in those seven days would be credited to Disney and Fantasia, it was clear from the audiences who were leaving after the fourteen minute short was done what they were there to see.

And for that week, this was the only way to see Thriller on the entire planet.

On December 2nd, MTV would show Thriller for the first time in prime time. Ten times the regular audience would turn in to watch. At the end of the video, MTV told their viewers they would watch it again if they wanted at the top of the hour. And they would show it every hour at the top of the hour for twenty-four straight hours. It would be MTV’s biggest day to date.

In February 1984, Showtime would air the video and its corresponding making-of featurette six times, and those airings would be amongst their biggest days in their nearly decade-long history. Vestron Home Video, a smaller videotape distributor based in Connecticut, would pay for the home video rights to the video and making-of featurette, and release it later in the spring. It would sell more than 900,000 copies at $29.99 MSRP. It would be the first major sell-through home video title, and usher in the mindframe that collecting movies on VHS was a totally normal thing, like a record collection. 

And the album?

It would quickly return to the top of the charts within weeks of the release of the video no one really wanted to make outside of Michael Jackson, and it would go on to sell another ten million copies just in 1984.

The red leather jacket worn by Jackson in the video, designed by Deborah Nadoolman, would become as iconic in pop culture as Indiana Jones’ fedora, which Nadoolman also hand-picked for that character. Shooting a music video as if it were a movie, and on 35mm film, would soon become the norm instead of the exception. Future filmmakers like Spike Jonze would use Thriller as a template for what they could get away with when they started making music videos in the 90s.

Over the years, Thriller has been deemed THE single best music video of all time by a number of news organizations and fans all around the world. An official 4K remastered version of the video was uploaded to YouTune in October 2009, a few months after Jackson’s unfortunately and untimely passing, where it has amassed more than 865m views over the past 13 years. And that’s just for that one version of the video. There are dozens more copies available on YouTube, each with millions of views of their own.

Thank you for joining us. 

And with that, we wrap up 2022 and our fourth season.

We’ll talk again in early January 2023, when the podcast will return for its fifth season, as we take a much needed vacation to Thailand for Christmas and New Years. 

2022 has been the best year for this podcast so far, and I want to thank every single one of you for spending some of your valuable time listening to me talk about older movies. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate all of you.

Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.

Thank you again.

Good night.